Posted
by
timothyon Tuesday June 25, 2013 @08:45AM
from the why-can't-they-send-them-all? dept.

rujholla writes "Microsoft has been trying to push Apple's iPad aside in favor of Surface tablets in schools, and now the Windows giant is looking to take on Google when it comes to search for students. Microsoft is including features such as allowing K-12 schools to remove advertisements from search results and enhanced privacy controls. Is this enough to beat the Google search quality edge? Or does that edge even still exist?"

I think this is a good thing. Sure its a marketing tactic, but its a good one. By removing ads and perhaps having a more education focused Bing, students will be able to search for what they want without as much noise. Hopefully Google will do the same if they aren't already.

Where's the money for Google? Microsoft can sell all kinds of stuff after using this as a promotional tool. Google can only sell ads, and I don't see them reacting to this until it's proven to have made an impact worth countering.

Where's the money for Google? Microsoft can sell all kinds of stuff after using this as a promotional tool. Google can only sell ads, and I don't see them reacting to this until it's proven to have made an impact worth countering.

The K12 student isn't going to be purchasing all that much when they are using the school's computer. But when they go home and they go to bing.com do do their searching there, or they change the default search engine on the family computer because "that's what we use at school" then it opens Microsoft up for more visits. Plus down the road when those K12 students have graduated, get jobs, and then have money to spend, maybe they'll be hooked on Bing.

Or at least in theory that's how it's suppose to work. Didn't work all that well for Apple in the 80s and 90s.

But when they go home and they go to bing.com do do their searching there, or they change the default search engine on the family computer because "that's what we use at school" then it opens Microsoft up for more visits.

Oh yeah. Because that's what kids do. Use stuff they make them use at school on their free time.

But *now* is Google "unbelievably better than all the alternatives"? I think not. Bing is as good as Google for most search (if not better in some instances).
Functionally there is nearly no difference. Bing/Yahoo have grown to around 7% of search traffic as of 2010 and that may be an even larger market share by now (I didn't Google it). Maybe Google can stay on top with Cloud Search but Google is by no means invulnerable.
Currently I'm using ixquick because they delete private details of their search u

Yep. You nipped it in the butt. We now have a viable alternative. I've found BING to help me in searches where google failed. Google is still my #1 but I use Bing on average once a week which is tones more than before.

^^^warning: this is what they mean by a jury of your peers.^^^Even if you use it a full octave above your previous usage, what you really need is a spell checker.

Eubonics is being replaced by Moronics.

a tough road to hoe.smoking mirrors.all intensive purposes.

Spell checkers don't help for stuff like this. All of the above are spelled correctly, and none of them are semantically correct. Although they are more or less homophonically correct. Correction. Almost all of the above are spelled correctly. It's "Ebonics", not "Eubonics".

Computers tend to validate these kinds of mistakes. Not only do most systems not highlight them, I'm pretty sure that some of the howlers I've typed myself came from auto-suggests of the wrong word when I wasn't paying attention.

Youtube for education requires a sign-up process for the school or destrict. You then have to add a cookie as a custom header. Assuming Microsoft do something similar then this will probably be tougher to do at home than installing an ad blocker add-on.

Microsoft can sell all kinds of stuff after using this as a promotional tool.

It doesn't look like they'll be making money any time soon.

"Microsoft To Start Dumping Surface RT To Schools

It’s fair to say that Microsoft’s Surface didn’t get the reception the company was hoping for. The tablet debuted last October and tanked shortly thereafter, thanks to an overly ambitious price point, poor software selection, and the myriad issues surrounding Windows 8. "

Those poor schoolkids - first they get Surface RTs dumped on them, now Bing? Microsoft should be prosecuted for child abuse!

It's sad that children have to be distracted to no good end so that we can eventually get surplus Surface RTs at government surplus prices, but that's how it is. No child will be left behind — we will take them all to war.

Hey, I'm surprised ad free isn't an iron-clad requirement in schools, not because of the captive audience silliness, but because enough helicoptering whack jobs of parents haven't lost it over how much it prevents their ADHD (that's still the cool one, right?) from being successful.

It would've been phrased better as "purely commercial search results", but you surely have done a search for facts that about (say) a health supplement; they offer to remove the scores of peddlers that'll plague your quest.

Honestly I think this is the better solution. Replacing one search engine with another one without ads (is that going to be the new patentable suffix of 2013?) just gets rid of the ads on the search engine. Adding an ad blocker will improve the situation everywhere the student searches, and adds a level of security protection while they are at it.Also would they be asking the schools to block Google? I would hope not, as that would probably break a lot of links in forum posts.[Something you might find i [google.com]

Bing is the successor to Microsoft's MSN search tool. Here's a site that will allow you to compare bing to Google. http://www.bingiton.com/ [bingiton.com]. I still use Google since Google tends to get me to technical results faster, but Bing really isn't a bad search engine if you can get past the fact that its done by Microsoft.

Actually I tried one of the 'Bing challenges" and wasn't a bit impressed. I searched for Coffee and got a map of Starbuck's within 50 miles of me (note, none closer than 15 miles) but it completely missed the 4 mon'n'pop places including one 5 miles from me that serves much better coffee.

In the olden days, I tried using search engines to improve my life, but none was a positive influence before I tried Google. Until the forces of darkness perpetrated SEO on the internet, the results were uncannily prescient, and on occasions when I tried the competition I found them unintuitive and the results worthless.Nowadays, I occasionally find Google quite useless as the wanted data has been obfuscated by commercial interests, but Bing seems to be the same with the few useful results stripped out.Now

There are quite a few ad remover extensions (in Microsoft-ese, "add-ons") for IE, although they aren't widely used relative to the browser's market share.

However, IE 9 and later (and 8 with enough finagling) include a feature called "Tracking Protection" ("InPrivate Filtering" on older versions) which is intended as a privacy enhancer, but works quite well as an ad-blocker too. By default, if you enable it in automatic mode, it will block any third-party request that it has seen across at least ten sites. O

Noise is unwanted random data existing amidst the resulting dataset. Google's ads are not noise, they are segregated and in a differently coloured box.

I actually propose an opposing idea. Students should be exposed to adverts, and they should be told they are adverts. They should learn from this and then learn to recognise the difference between data and adverts.

By keeping our learning lives ad-free we lose the stimulus that teaches us to identify the ads.

I see where you are coming from. The concern is that if kids never see ads, how will they recognize ads as adults? While I recognize that, I purposely keep my children ad free as much as possible and its had a lot of positive effects. When my kids go down the cereal aisle at a supermarket, they're not screaming for the brand name cereal like my siblings and I did as children. I'm able to teach them first to look at nutrition labels, how to spot marketing techniques like greenwashing, etc... And now that they are able to think, we can sit down and discuss an advertisement when they show up.

A bit of a story. My 3yo son was playing with an app geared for preschoolers when suddenly a full video toy ad played. He was captivated, thought they were the most amazing toy ever, and began repeating the catchphrase of the ad all day that day. My 6yo daughter sat down with him and said, "That's an ad. It looks cool, but in real life it might not be as much fun as the ad makes it out to be." She understood it.

So my point is to have the parent educate their kids on marketing rather than have them figure it out the hard way by becoming a target of advertising.

A bit of a story. My 3yo son was playing with an app geared for preschoolers when suddenly a full video toy ad played. He was captivated, thought they were the most amazing toy ever, and began repeating the catchphrase of the ad all day that day. My 6yo daughter sat down with him and said, "That's an ad. It looks cool, but in real life it might not be as much fun as the ad makes it out to be." She understood it.

That's a basically an ideal textbook anecdote, because studies have shown that children cannot [on average] differentiate between programs and commercials until about age eight. (I could, but I could read well before I was three, and I could read about things like commercials. I grew up with encyclopedias and a dictionary in my room...)

I completely agree. But I wonder if the reason they cannot differentiate between ads and programs is that they are exposed to them all the time. By keeping my daughter mostly shielded from ads, ads became a stark contrast from the rest of the program when they do come on. We recorded Power Rangers Mega Force on our DVR and whenever a commercial came on my son 3yo would cry because he had watched the previous 20 seasons of Power Rangers ad free. He seriously thought that the show had ended. I think a lot of

I use Ixquick as well, along with NoScript and RequestPolicy. And I still see ads. I don't care though, because they aren't using JS or coming from a site that tracks me.

I also use Duckduckgo, Wolfram Alpha, and other search engines as necessary. And sometimes I find that Google still provides the best results (particularly for location specific information, and for non-USA information). But it's getting rarer.

But there are so many tools out there that do provide better results than Google a lot of the time

First bing result for Melbourne: 'Melbourne / m l b n, - b r n / is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia.'
First bing result for Moscow: 'Moscow is the capital city and the most populous federal subject of Russia'

Sure the first result might be good, but as I said, half the results are irrelevant. A search on Google for Moscow gives me a page full of links about the Moscow I care about (one link about some business method with strange caps). It's not until the second page (and the second half of the page) that I get a result about the city of Moscow in SomeState USA.

Of course, a lot of the results from Google are irrelevant recent news. If I search Ixquick, I get fewer news articles, only two hits for that city in Id

Similarly for Moscow, half the first page results are for some insignificant location in Idaho.

I'll have you know my son worked for the university there one summer doing computer security research, you insensitive clod.
(More seriously, there's a not-insignificant US military presence in that city and school.)

As a search application I cannot stand using Google or going to their website anymore. If Google isn't second guessing your typing it's including results that have nothing to do with your search.

My personal favorite right now is "ubuntu change bluetooth mac". Google claims 'About 4,890,000 results', yet you don't even get off the first page of results before the results have lost all relevancy. I get it if it's an esoteric search, but if it is just tell me '20 results' and leave it at that.

As an IT guy that mostly works on Microsoft-branded software, I continue to be amused that Google consistently indexes solutions for problems with MS products (including Microsoft's own content much of the time...even MSDN and KB articles) more handily than Bing.

I've taken the "Bing Challenge" yearly since I knew about it (three times, I think? four?). Granted, I search for stuff that most people don't, but I'm not all that worried about search results for the typical stuff...I'm interested in results for the stuff that's specific and hard to find. Things where you have to whittle down results by adding in error codes and parts of event log entries...Bing has lost every time when I've just used a recent real-world search term...sometimes less or less-relevant results, and sometimes no results at all, compared to getting me to the answer I needed.

That said, for the stuff K-12 students are likely to *need* to search for in a school environment, Bing is probably fine. It's a less-capable search engine in general, IMHO, but it's good enough for typical searches for "with no ads!!!" to be a reasonable selling point for schools.

That said, for the stuff K-12 students are likely to *need* to search for in a school environment, Bing is probably fine. It's a less-capable search engine in general, IMHO, but it's good enough for typical searches for "with no ads!!!" to be a reasonable selling point for schools.

I was with you up to this point.

"good enough for typical searches for "with no ads!!!"" is not good enough for me. I want my kids to learn to think for themselves and make use of all the tools at their disposal. It's especially important at the grade school level where they develop the habits they'll use for the rest of their academic career and beyond.

This is a marketing strategy and I would be offended if I found out that my daughter's school was forcing her to use Bing. I won't have MS using my kids education as a marketing tool against their competitor at the cost of her future education and research habits. If the school wanted to provide Bing as the default, but still allowed the students to use Google, Yahooh or DuckDuckGo, I'd be ok with that, but I'm not ok with them choosing one and limiting exposure to other methods and comparing results.

...It's not good enough for me either. I was saying that I could understand the removal of commercial, sponsored results being enough for a hypothetical school district to say they'd switch. I agree with everything in your post, actually.

In hindsight my last post makes me sound a lot angrier than I actually am, but I think if ads are an issue schools should be using ad blockers. I don't think limiting the information they have access to is an acceptable solution. I may be misunderstanding what "commercial or sponsored" results refers to.

Just like Google does in search results, Microsoft includes sponsored results. Typically it's a situation where you pay for placement, so they're talking about removing commercially-sponsored results and only including normal algorithmic ones. Ad blockers don't drop search results, just linked content, so this proposed benefit is different from what an ad blocker would get you.

That's much clearer. Still if a school was to limit students to only using Bing because supposedly MS would remove commercial or sponsored results, do you think we could actually trust MS to do that? I seriously doubt it.

MS could weasel it's way into a monopoly in schools, limit students exposure to their competition, hurt the competition in the long run AND get the sponsored results. I'd still be pretty P.Oed if that was the stance my kids school was taking.

Actually, it sounds like the government wants to make this a mostly moot point (just saw an article about the FTC saying that advertisements in search results must be clearly identifiable, regardless of how they are delivered).

Doing that would make it pretty easy to remove them or hide them conditionally with a browser plug-in.

Yeah, I read that too. Now it sounds to me like MS knew that was coming down the pipeline, I wouldn't be surprised if they had a hand in it, and decided to get in on the ground floor so they could say, "Hay look at us we did it willingly, that Google guy is trying to screw you over!!"

Show the young boys the movie "Room in Rome". Bing plays a big part in the movie. It is used several times and is very important to the plot of the movie. There is no attempt to hide that fact so I would assume that they are getting paid to use it. For those who have not seen the movie, it is about two females who meet and spend the night in a hotel room in Rome. They are naked about 70% of the movie and climax several times. If one gets past the sex, the movie is a heartbreaking movie about the str

Nothing breaks my suspension of disbelief in a movie more than seeing a tech-savvy kid or young adult using Bing. I've seen it in several movies now, and they always make it blatantly obvious that they are using Bing and not Google.

I don't use Bing, either, but I do if someone's looking over my shoulder. I also say thing things like, "let me Bing that for you." The reactions are great, but I think I actually got some people using it. I feel a little bad for that.

"Disgusting teen lesbos" There is nothing disgusting about two females trying to give affection to one another. It is a lot better than tv programs like "24" where someone is murdered about every 5 minutes. Your comment is from the 8th century or before.

I don't think Microsoft is allowed to do things that would jeopardize its relationship with advertisers on MSN.com and the like. Sure, Microsoft can give schools an ad-free subscription to a web site operated by Microsoft. But if Microsoft were to add functionality to strip advertisements from web sites that Microsoft does not operate, advertisers would likely retaliate by pulling their advertisements from Microsoft sites.

Even if you're forced to use IE with no extensions,
you (the sysadmin) can still block your ads, for example, in a DNS basis. Heck, you already have the fanboy list, so you don't even need to compile it. Alternatively, see adsuck [conformal.com]. Great thing about computers is that you can usually work around problems.

It isn't necessarily that way, though. Many colleges do not support internet exploder, and only support Firefox. That was the case when I went back to community college to finally get a trivial degree. Our IT manager was a cool guy who knew how to do things and actually, you know, got it. And the IT director was not only fairly well-versed, but also intelligent enough to listen to her manager. Obviously we still used Microsoft Orifice. The school's infomation system was on a 4-way Alpha when I got there, an

Assuming Google can deliver better search results than Bing, some people may be more willing to put up with advertising and fewer privacy-protecting features.

If Bing produces poor search results, all the privacy features and lack of advertising in the world are not terribly useful: the primary purpose of a search engine is to allow people to search for (and presumably find) things.

Here's an experiment. Search for "Lowes Stud Finder" on Google while in the US.

WITH ADVERTISING: first four results are:[ad] www.lowes.com[ad] www.amazon.com/tools[ad] www.franklinsensors.comwww.lowes.com/Tools/Layout-Measuring/Stud-Finders/_/N.../pl

WITHOUT ADVERTISING: first four results are:www.lowes.com/Tools/Layout-Measuring/Stud-Finders/_/N.../plwww.lowes.com/pd_274870-317-SS+EDGE_0__?...stud+finder...www.lowes.com/pd_197656-317-SS+E50_0__www.lowes.com/pd_197653-317-MS+I520_0__

I appreciate what Bing has brought to the table, but the reality is that young people and educators simply don't turn to Bing for search or, in the case of school, research.
What the Bing engagement team might consider is that educators are driven in part by their passion, but also by their need to help young people understand specific subject content in a simple, efficient way. Google's search education team, and more specifically, the efforts that have yielded their search education curricula ( http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searcheducation/ [google.com] ) , is fantastically helpful in that regard. Moreover, their team offers MOOCs, educator conversations and hangouts to clarify how search works. There are other, untapped opportunities that both engines could explore to essentially one-up one another in the education space (for example, how might LRMI integrate?).
It would be a pleasure to learn that the Bing team has committed equal resources to developing quality lessons, interface options and community engagement. Alone, however, I don't believe that removing advertising and privacy control modifications are changes enough to make a sizable difference.
--Dave

At this point the only reason a prefer Google search is that I have Firefox configured to remove all advertising from Google. Until it's similarly easy to strip all advertising out of Bing it's just not worth looking at.

I tried to use bing for a while, out of concern that google may know too much of me (already using gmail and calendar, at least my searches should go elsewhere). But the search results are just too bad, alas.

I tried DuckDuckGo last year for a bit. I loved their philosophy, and I loved some of the enhancements they made to the whole search experience... but at least when I tried it, their actual search results were kinda crap. When I realized about 2/3s of the time I just ended up typing !google [search terms], I said screw it and went back to google.

I'd rather Google get all my searches and everything than Microsoft anyway, though. At least Google knows how to do useful things with all that data.

Why would ad removal on the search engine be even slightly useful as a marketing hook?

Or, to rephrase the question, why would a school which gives a crap about kids seeing ads not already be running ad blocking software everywhere possible? It shouldn't be more complicated than a check mark in their existing porn/malware/Facebook filters...

I always like to point out that in Scotland a Bing is a spoil heap, it's the pile of dirt that you take out of the ground and discard to get at the minerals you actually want, worst name for a search engine ever.

Google almost never gives me anything remotely useful for rarer and non-trivial searches.

* Google will, almost always, rewrite the query to something it can find over a million search results for and then require you click on a link, easily missed, to get the query you actually had.
* On being told "No, I really wanted to search for..." it will then ignore your search query and come up with anything related to one word in your query rather than the entire thing.

This is what bugs me the most. In an effort to have million of hits for every search, they've completely screwed up the actual usefulness of the search itself. It wouldn't be so bad if Google had always sucked, but it actually used to be very good.

The power of Google is its ability to provide higher quality results for rarer and non-trivial searches. Bing has made no attempt to compete here

Wouldn't that be mainly due to Google's incumbancy?

As someone who rarely goes to Bing, and just took a peak, I am always amazed at how much of Google MS has mimicked. Layouts, menus, color schemes. There appears to be very little that is really original or obvious improvements. Not talking even about quality of results. Which would seem to indicate, if you want the latest / greatest features in search, you will see them first at Google. Bing is just an imitation. Its like they are providing a branded version of Google.
Which isn't news. MS has a long hist

Make up your own damn mind!I don't need third party statistics to see that every time I give Bing a try I end up wasting more time and end up going back to Google.

This is across the board. It does not matter if I am looking for help with our Windows Domain (LOL) or if I am looking for info on growing the biggest tomatoes on the block.Try searching the Microsoft website for the download location of some service pack vs doing the same on Google. The later tends to get me right where I want to go with ONE cli

I tried the Bing It On challenge, just for fun. On at least one question I thought I was selecting the Bing result, but it turned out that I chose Google 4 out of 4 times. Bing falls apart as soon as you try using any of the special "tricks" that Google provides.